<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/14/1105070/africa-crops-maize-kenya-climate-change-agriculture/>
"The first time the rains failed, the farmers of Kanaani were prepared for it.
It was April of 2021, and as climate change had made the weather increasingly
erratic, families in the eastern Kenyan village had grown used to saving food
from previous harvests. But as another wet season passed with barely any rain,
and then another, the community of small homesteads, just off the main road
linking Nairobi to the coast of the Indian Ocean, found itself in a
full-fledged hunger crisis.
By the end of 2022, Danson Mutua, a longtime Kanaani resident, counted himself
lucky that his farm still had pockets of green: Over the years, he’d gradually
replaced much of his maize, the staple crop in Kenya and several other parts of
Africa, with more drought-resistant crops. He’d planted sorghum, a tall grass
capped with tufts of seeds that look like arrowheads, as well as protein-rich
legumes like pigeon peas and green gram, which don’t require any chemical
fertilizers and are also prized for fixing nitrogen in soils. Many of his
neighbors’ fields were completely parched. Cows, with little to eat themselves,
had stopped producing milk; some had started dying. While it was still possible
to buy grain at the local market, prices had spiked, and few people had the
cash to pay for it.
Mutua, a father of two, began using his bedroom to secure the little he’d
managed to harvest. “If I left it out, it would have disappeared,” he told me
from his home in May, 14 months after the rains had finally returned and
allowed Kanaani’s farmers to begin recovering. “People will do anything to get
food when they’re starving.”
The food insecurity facing Mutua and his neighbors is hardly unique. In 2023,
according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, an
estimated 733 million people around the world were “undernourished,” meaning
they lacked sufficient food to “maintain a normal, active, and healthy life.”
After falling steadily for decades, the prevalence of global hunger is now on
the rise—nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa, where conflicts, economic
fallout from the covid-19 pandemic, and extreme weather events linked to
climate change pushed the share of the population considered undernourished
from 18% in 2015 to 23% in 2023. The FAO estimates that 63% of people in the
region are “food insecure”—not necessarily undernourished but unable to
consistently eat filling, nutritious meals.
In Africa, like anywhere, hunger is driven by many interwoven factors, not all
of which are a consequence of farming practices. Increasingly, though,
policymakers on the continent are casting a critical eye toward the types of
crops in farmers’ plots, especially the globally dominant and
climate-vulnerable grains like rice, wheat, and above all, maize. Africa’s
indigenous crops are often more nutritious and better suited to the hot and dry
conditions that are becoming more prevalent, yet many have been neglected by
science, which means they tend to be more vulnerable to diseases and pests and
yield well below their theoretical potential. Some refer to them as “orphan
crops” because of this.
Efforts to develop new varieties of many of these crops, by breeding for
desired traits, have been in the works for decades—through state-backed
institutions, a continent-wide research consortium, and underfunded scientists’
tinkering with hand-pollinated crosses. Now those endeavors have gotten a major
boost: In 2023, the US Department of State, in partnership with the African
Union, the FAO, and several global agriculture institutions, launched the
Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, or VACS, a new Africa-focused initiative
that seeks to accelerate research and development for traditional crops and
help revive the region’s long-depleted soils. VACS, which had received funding
pledges worth $200 million as of August, marks an important turning point, its
proponents say—not only because it’s pumping an unprecedented flow of money
into foods that have long been disregarded but because it’s being driven by the
US government, which has often promoted farming policies around the world that
have helped entrench maize and other food commodities at the expense of local
crop diversity."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-payphone-experiment-bridging-political-divides/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
